


The Blazing Trail

by wanda von dunayev (wandavon)



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types
Genre: Blood Elves, Character Study, Community: fic_promptly, Farstriders, Gen, Rangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 08:00:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandavon/pseuds/wanda%20von%20dunayev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A ranger may lose himself in the woods, but he is never lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blazing Trail

It is only when he hits the first line of the city that he becomes himself again.

The darkness covers the ground like layers of water closing over Halduron's head where the trees begin, submerging him. But the light is mottled gold and red, not blue and green, and he catches glimpses of himself--in still ponds, in the face of his knife--and sees he looks like something else not mortal: an old and elemental soul of fire perhaps, come back to Quel’Thalas to claim the people and the land with its hunger yet unsated, charring the earth in a conflagration so hot it melts away the dead scar’s filth, melts the bronze from the tiles, melts hair and teeth and bones. And he knows that there are men behind the walls of Silvermoon who would welcome that spark like falling into the embrace of a long-awaited lover. 

Halduron is wed to rivers and forests, not flame and shadow, and his heart does not yearn to pry apart flesh for secrets but to listen to the woods and its soft, steady voice, its pulse and its sigh. But though he listens for the sound of the falls up ahead, he can hear the crash and clang of construction in the city as they raise the towers again skywards, and he imagines the reek of the sewers being pulled up and stripped of their hundreds of decomposing corpses, and the pyres that are still burning bodies, and the flare of sunlight as cutting on the Spellbreakers’ shields as the green burn of fel crystal. They watch the magisters work, and though Halduron knows he should know this, knows that it is part of a language he must learn as once he learned Common and Dwarven and all the little words of the wilderness, he wonders who exactly is watching who.

It is only here that he becomes himself, not steel but sinew, his feet cushioned by ten thousand years of leaf-falls in a forest so vast and ancient some of its groves have not been found, some of its vines uncut, its creatures unafraid, and all of it as sacred as the Light and the Sunwell, magic and beauty. This is where he comes closest to believing in something, because he believes he can see himself with the eyes of everything around him, no longer one set against many, set against his enemies, set against his allies who are his enemies, but moving with a purpose that guides him as surely as a puppeteer works a puppet. And if there is blood, it will be nothing more than the internal shift of the world, spinning and tugging along its ten thousand threads of impossible fineness, carving them all up in its unstoppable forward motion.

A branch snaps beneath his foot. A doe looks up. It bolts. His arrow clatters useless against the tree a moment after he looses it, and then the stomach-sinking whoosh of another, but he does not curse. Next time, he will be quieter.

It is only here that he becomes himself, because it is only here that it is not a war of the ever-living children against death, or of all against all, or rangers against magisters, but the bloody heart of Eversong, implacable in its wisdom, fearsome in its logic. No war but wilderness, and the wilderness pulses too in him.

**Author's Note:**

> Halduron is one character I never though I'd see myself write about, but this prompt from fic_promptly was too perfect for him to pass up. It was "lost in the woods" (which a Farstrider never, ever is), with the fandom and character left to the writer's choice.


End file.
